HE years of Milton's poetic career fall naturally into three groups: First the glorious decade of

his youth, spent at Cambridge and Horton, during which were produced the poems that may be called those of promise, as full of delight as the promise of the morn, beginning with the Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, and ending with Lycidas. Following this came the twenty years of the middle period, from which sprang the impassioned cantos of his prose, a time of enormous importance to the poet as one of intellectual equipment and gestation, but which at the time was almost barren of poetic result in the form of verse. After this came another decade, or a little more, of magnificent achievement, the fruition of that aspiring purpose which is plainly seen throughout his whole career.

During the twenty years of the middle period Milton wrote no verse except a little sheaf of sonnets in English and Italian. These may well be separated and a part of them disregarded in a serious study of his poetry,

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AMROHLIA STUDIES IN MILTON

since certain of their number are but the hasty record of transitory moods, so unpoetic sometimes as that of anger or resentment, and are hardly more to the student than literary curiosities. Among the sonnets, however, are those which are of vital importance to any correct understanding of the poet's nature, intimate confessions which spring from the very fountain sources of sincerity.

If Wordsworth could say of the sonnet form: "With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,"-with equal fitness may it be affirmed of the Puritan poet. Through this medium more than once has he revealed vital traits of temperament, which we are fortunate indeed to discern. In the sonnets is found the record of his affections; if his loves were discreet, at least were they vital to his happiness, the very nourishment of his soul. The sonnets register as well the pleasant relations which existed between him and the younger men who were always attracted to him, they record his appreciation of several of the leaders of the Parliamentary cause, and they show his connection with public affairs of importance both at home and abroad.

In the verses To the Nightingale, usually called the First Sonnet, and composed in the same year as the lines On Shakespeare, when Milton was twenty-two years of age, the poet followed the accepted models of the time, and wrote in the vein of Spenser's Amoretti, and of the Italian sonnets, with which he was familiar:

O Nightingale that on yon bloomy spray

Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still,
Thou with fresh hope the lover's heart dost fill,
While the jolly hours lead on propitious May.

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Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day,

First heard before the shallow cuckoo's bill,
Portend success in love. O, if Jove's will v
Have linked that amorous power to thy soft lay,
Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate e
Foretell my hopeless doom, in some grove nigh;
As thou from year to year hast sung too late
For my relief, yet hadst no reason why.

Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate,
Both them I serve, and of their train am I. ›

The poet's slighting reference to the "shallow cuckoo" is in striking contrast, and perfectly in dramatic keeping, with his enthusiastic and oft-repeated praise of the nightingale. The epithet "shallow" is used more than once by him to express contempt. Emerson has recorded in his journal that his clever aunt, toward whom he was under such infinite obligation, once in a mood of expansiveness said to him, "I hate a fool"; and, as nearly as the mild and placid nature of Emerson was capable of harbouring hatred at all, it was exactly this sort of person that most severely tried his patience. Milton took no pains to conceal his contempt for the same individual; he could, and did, hate a fool with all his might. In Paradise Regained Christ speaks of one

"Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself."

(P. R., IV., 327.)

To be shallow, with this man, was to be without the pale; here he could tolerate no compromise, it implied a lack of sincerity; to be wanting in that was to be a candidate for the nethermost pit, and the poet was never one wantonly to deprive the regions thereabout of any part or parcel of their Heaven-appointed host.

Mark Pattison has commented upon Milton's "bloomy spray," reminding us that the flush of colour in the tender branches is apparent at the time when the nightingale first comes in April, before the bursting of the buds, when the circulation of the sap beneath brings a purple glow to the surface of the bark; and he aptly quotes from Arnold's Thyrsis:

Leafless, yet soft as spring,

The tender purple spray on copse and briar.

The exquisite bloom which this casts over the naked woods seen as a whole, and at a little distance, is as adorable as the blushing of the morn; the time is the morning of the year, a season ever dear to the awakened sensibilities of the poet. He is correct in placing the arrival of the nightingale and cuckoo before the leaves are out, but except for these slight touches of exact observation, the sonnet reveals little more of poetic sensibility or exercise of poetic art than a certain facility after Italian models.

In all that made appeal to the ear Milton had a sure and unfailing instinct of appreciation and delight but in his observation of the external universe he was in no sense a naturalist, as Gray, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson perhaps, and Shakespeare, may be said to have been naturalists,-in their poems garnering with delight "the harvest of a quiet eye." Milton loved scenery in its broad effects, and had all of the poet's sensitiveness to the various moods of nature, and to the subtle variants of morning and of evening, and of night; one has but to recall the "opening eyelids of the morn" and a thousand similar expressions to be sure of that,